Pics: Accidents in India

This is a discussion on Pics: Accidents in India within Road Safety, part of the Team-BHP category; Originally Posted by balenoed_
Ghastly accident and horrific pictures. I feel it could be a classic example of the driver ...

Ghastly accident and horrific pictures. I feel it could be a classic example of the driver not realizing the power/limitations (in this case, Limitations) of the new car which he is not used to enough. Or the Truck rammed insanely on to the car, which is unlikely the case here.

That one is a ghastly accident! May the souls of the departed RIP and give strength to their near and dear ones to cope up with the loss.

The moment I noticed a neatly marked road and the fact that this was a Dajjiworld article & Location as Karkala, I was more than sure this would be the Padubidre-Belman-Nitte-Karkala stretch.

Good roads are a boon but my biggest scare is that these good roads are taking too many lives out with these accidents!

Driven on the same road couple of times now and I can easily say that it is one of the best single carriageways I have come across in the recent past - Well done, Super good surface, Long straights and usual curves (few of them sharp) and above all, very well marked road with a lot of signage/reflectors, adequate shoulder on every stretch of this road and more around the apex of curves and should I say, at par with international standards.

When I drove on this last year in October, it didn't have a single speed breaker and when I did this last may, there were quite a few rumblers nearing villages and accident prone spots.

No amount of safety elements as part of the design of these roads is going to help reduce accidents in our country unless all the drivers are educated about following safe & defensive driving techniques.

I've taken the below image from the quoted article, because what confuses me is the bumper of the truck.

The black bumper just below the headlamp has significant damage on the right side of the truck (on the left of the picture), but that's because its either plastic or sheet metal. However, below that is a metal bar that appears undamaged - you can see the 4" long reflective silver tape on both the left and right side of the bumper.

The thing that confuses me here is: How did this bumper get away without significant damage? It is at the correct height to safely impact cars (i.e. it is a frontal under-run protection bar) and runs the full width of the truck.

My only suspicion/fear is that the bumper was strong enough that it just picked up scratches and got slightly pushed down on the right side, yet ripped through the car, because it didn't meet an equivalently strong structure within the car - so it ended up going like a knife through butter. Going by the damage to the Nano, there isn't any noteworthy frontal damage, so the Nano wasn't hitting head on, but was at an angle with the impact point on the front right fender. Small overlap crash tests have shown how hard it is to reinforce vehicles adequately since there's very little frontal crash structure that gets engaged in such a crash.

The truck actually looks quite safe to ply on the road - apart from the frontal under-run bar I've mentioned, it also has side under-run protection. I've often been critical of the absence of crash safety elements on trucks on our roads - this truck is what others trucks should aspire to be!

The truck actually looks quite safe to ply on the road - apart from the frontal under-run bar I've mentioned, it also has side under-run protection. I've often been critical of the absence of crash safety elements on trucks on our roads - this truck is what others trucks should aspire to be!

Extremely safe - it looks like a reasonably new Bharat Benz. So built with Merc technology though not the Merc marque and maybe far less frills than a Merc would have. Certainly has all the legally mandated protections available such as proper underrun protection that's integral to the frame instead of an iron rod that is welded onto an old Tata truck.

As for the windshield damage it could be some metal part from the nano coming loose and flying up to impact on the windshield? It was crushed nearly in half so wheels, or fender or something might have got thrust up in the impact and hit the windshield.

The truck actually looks quite safe to ply on the road - apart from the frontal under-run bar I've mentioned, it also has side under-run protection. I've often been critical of the absence of crash safety elements on trucks on our roads - this truck is what others trucks should aspire to be!

Well said. Also as mentioned in one of the above posts, together both the truck and road are on par with International standards.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chetan_Rao

Did that truck hit something else too? The car couldn't have inflicted the damage around the windscreen & immediately below (front right), isn't that too high up?

Considering the light weight of the Nano, could it be that the rear of the car tossed up and hit the wind shield, brushed up the driver door causing a dent on it and then back bang on the road.

It looks like an overtaking attempt terribly gone wrong by miscalculating the time to get back on the left lane.

If so, the lesson learnt again, if you are not 100℅ sure that you can overtake on a single carriage way, ABORT.

The car driver might have been too late in an overtaking maneuver and the truck might have hit on the front right while he was cutting back to the left lane. The crack on the windshield is inward and so are the minor dents just below it suggesting that something has hit from outside and not the driver's head banging on it.

I came across a similar accident last Tuesday while travelling from Hunsur to Mysore. A cow had suddenly jumped out of a median, with heavy vegetation. The Etios was too late to change the course and had hit the cow resulting in its death. The car had frontal damages to its wind screen and bonnet. Its very dangerous some times to travel near the median!

Sometimes, you would have these giants waking in your way when you are in their territory. Specially night time travel would be quite dangerous.

Wrong. The Small overlap frontal test is specific to IIHS (introduced in 2012) and not a part of Global NCAP (which is heavily based on Euro NCAP) who tested the Nano. Compare the below images of the tests and you can find that the Nano is tested @ 40% overlap and the Spark @ 25% overlap.